Thursday, June 7, 2012


One Solution For Almost Any Storage-Related Problem


Aberdeen AberSAN Z-Series & Its Web-Based GUI
Offer Simplified Hard Drive Management


In most cases, it’s safe to say that the more parts something has, the more complicated it is. This sentiment fits the world of mass storage solutions perfectly. It’s relatively easy to locate and manage one hard drive in a single desktop computer or even as many as eight hard drives in a larger storage platform, but the difficulty increases to new highs when dozens or hundreds of drives are involved. While current ZFS-based offerings allow you to alphabetize hard drives according to unique identifiers, there is no simple or intuitive way to know exactly where that drive is in the array.
“Adding, removing, or replacing a hard drive typically rearranges the list,” says Yuval Bymel, R&D engineer at Aberdeen. “These hard drive changes make it impossible to have a label on the system showing the correct order of the drives at any given time. Under ideal conditions, this may be an adequate solution. But when a drive fails, or if it completely disappears from that list, there is no easy way to identify the slot in which that drive resides.”
To help data center and IT managers overcome this hard drive hassle, Aberdeen built its Z-Series line of scalable storage products with its proprietary Web-based GUI that makes it easy to not only identify the hard drive, but also pinpoint its exact location in the array. This GUI goes above and beyond the traditional ZFS system to make hard drive swaps or fixes quicker and easier.
Scalable Storage Products
Aberdeen’s Z-Series is a line of scalable storage products designed to be customized to your needs. Whether you need to store a few terabytes of data or as much as a petabyte or more, the Z-Series platform can handle it. Aberdeen also made sure these solutions would be ready for future use and offers 10Gb Ethernet or 8Gb Fibre connectivity to the storage solutions as an optional add-on.
The GUI built into Aber-deen’s Z-Series line of solutions creates an accurate graphical representation of your entire array, letting you see the physical location of a server’s hard drives without manually searching through the array. When you click an individual drive, the GUI shows you its location on the server itself as well as its physical location within the array. And the GUI will also take any changes you’ve made into account. “You can rest assured the GUI matches the server’s hard drive slot label and retains that order no matter which drives you use, how many you have, or even if you have to replace a failed drive,” Bymel says.
The Z-Series GUI also lets you select which drive you want to replace while keeping all of your hard drives in the correct order. You can even rearrange the order at any given time or move your drives to another enclosure. Regardless of how you choose to arrange or manage your drives, the Z-Series GUI will keep up with you and provide the same identification and location information based on the new configuration.
Easier To Use
Aberdeen’s addition of the Web-based GUI serves to make the Z-Series even easier to use in the data center. The platform is scalable enough to support a wide range of storage needs and can scale to as much as a petabyte of storage or more because the GUI makes it easier to locate, swap out, or move hard drives.  Regardless of how large or small your storage needs, Aberdeen can help with a solution that will relieve your hard drive headaches. 
 
"Aberdeen’s Z-Series line of scalable storage solutions are built with a ZFS-based file management system as well as a helpful, Web-based GUI that makes it easy to identify and locate specific hard drives in an array."

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